727764

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QIXXXX10.1177/1077800417727764Qualitative InquirySt. Pierre

Article
Qualitative Inquiry

Haecceity: Laying Out a Plane

2017, Vol. 23(9) 686­–698
© The Author(s) 2017
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DOI: 10.1177/1077800417727764
https://doi.org/10.1177/1077800417727764
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Elizabeth Adams St.Pierre1

Abstract
This article traces 25 years of scholarship that used the concept haecceity to slowly deconstruct or deterritorialize
conventional qualitative methodology and think post qualitative inquiry, which might help lay out a plane of inquiry that will
enable new concepts and practices such as using concepts instead of methods to inquire.

Keywords
concept, haecceity, Deleuze, post qualitative, ontology

To reach not the point where one no longer says I, but the point thought in the humanist methodological structure that orga-
where it is no longer of any importance whether one says “I.” nized my study. If I’d had those concepts before I began the
—(Deleuze & Guattari, 1980/1987, p. 3) study, I doubt I would have done it at all. What might I have
been able to think and do if I’d had the concepts from the
This article does not describe how I deliberately set out to beginning? As it was, I knew my dissertation research was
use a concept as a method or instead of a method in social ruined, unthinkable, and undoable after haecceity. Over the
science inquiry, though one might use either approach. years, I’ve learned this failure is a common experience for
Rather, it describes a chance encounter 25 years ago during social science researchers who find Deleuze and Guattari’s
my dissertation research with an old ontological concept, ontology late in their research projects.
haecceity, which I found in Deleuze and Guattari’s I had experienced other “shock[s] to thought” (Massumi,
(1980/1987) concept-laden book, A Thousand Plateaus: 2002b) during my doctoral studies from feminism and post-
Capitalism and Schizophrenia. The intensity of that encoun- structuralism, which had fortuitously shattered my world.
ter produced an irruption that began to slowly deconstruct Could I manage another turn, the turn to ontology, about
the ontological-epistemological-methodological structure which I knew almost nothing, so late in my doctoral pro-
of my study—a normalized, systematized, formalized social gram? Could I bear to rethink everything again? If I wanted
science research methodology we teach, learn, and perpetu- to graduate on time, I couldn’t throw out my study and begin
ate which I now call conventional humanist qualitative again, so I tried to put haecceity aside and continue. But it
methodology (St. Pierre, 2011a, p. 613)—to make way for was too late. Haecceity’s ontological promise had infected
another I call post qualitative inquiry (Lather & St. Pierre, everything, and the dogmatic ontological-epistemological-
2013; St. Pierre, 2011a, 2013a, 2015, 2016a) which comes methodological image of thought that structured my study
with no methodology at all, no preexisting rules, processes, weighed me down with old problems that allowed only cer-
methods, categories, or “determining judgment” (Lyotard, tain questions about subjectivity, overdetermined questions
1979/1984, p. 81) and so cannot be taught or learned. repeatedly asked and answered using exhausted concepts.
I was well along in my dissertation research, having used Discouraged, I realized my study existed in the given, the
the process and methods of conventional humanist qualitative predetermined and not in the possible, the experimental. It
methodology to collect data using face-to-face interviews and would be years before I would understand that ontological
ethnographic observations, and was stuck at the analysis/writ- difference—the absolutely new and singular—is everywhere
ing stage when the concept, haecceity, produced an immediate
and intense rupture that stopped me in my tracks. My study 1
University of Georgia, Athens, GA, USA
focused on human subjectivity, and it was clear that haecceity
Corresponding Author:
and related ontological concepts like the fold and the rhizome I Elizabeth Adams St.Pierre, Professor, Critical Studies, Department of
had just found in Deleuze and Guattari’s immanentist ontology Educational Theory and Practice, University of Georgia, 604E Aderhold
and radical, transcendental empiricism responded to a problem Hall, Athens, GA 30602, USA.
about human being and being more generally that could not be Email: [email protected]
St. Pierre 687

before we normalize it. As a compromise, I wrote a conven- subject must repeat itself again and again to maintain its
tional methodology chapter for my dissertation and then identity, to recognize itself and be recognized, and can,
deconstructed it. During the next 20 years or so, I slowly therefore, refuse to repeat itself, can practice “subversive
resisted and finally refused conventional humanist qualita- repetition” (Butler, 1990, p. 32). This was a different kind
tive methodology. of freedom, an everyday practice of freedom I had already
Derrida (1990) wrote that “deconstruction is neither a put to work.
theory nor a philosophy. It is neither a school nor a method. Foucault (1982), who studied discursive-material forma-
It is not even a discourse, nor an act, nor a practice. It is tions—including the human sciences—by which, in which,
what happens” (p. 85) in spite of our attempts to keep famil- we have transformed ourselves into different kinds of sub-
iar, comfortable structures intact. Let me be clear that jects, encouraged us to “refuse what we are . . . we have to
deconstructing conventional humanist qualitative method- promote new forms of subjectivity through the refusal of this
ology and thinking post qualitative inquiry was not deliber- kind of individuality” (p. 216). I found Foucault’s free-
ate or intentional and did not happen quickly. For me, the dom—refusing subjectification—powerful as well.
deconstructive work that began about 1994 with my Nietzsche (1992), the radical forebear of the postmodern cri-
encounter with haecceity was slow and involved many tique of the humanist subject, refused the “I,” arguing there
years of reading, writing, thinking, and living. It required a is no such substratum; there is no “being” behind doing,
“very lengthy preparation, yet no method, nor rules, nor effecting, becoming; “the doer” is merely a fiction added to
recipes” (Deleuze & Parnet, 2007, p. 8), because decon- the deed—“the deed is everything” (p. 481). Spivak (1974),
struction is not a method one intentionally applies or uses. referring to and quoting Nietzsche’s critique of the humanist
On the contrary, deconstruction is what happens “when we subject, argued that “the “subject” is a unified concept and
cannot apply the rules” (Keenan, 1997, p. 5); when one therefore the result of “interpretation”; therefore, the “inser-
must say “the impossible ‘no’ to a structure, which one cri- tion of a subject” is “fictitious” (p. xxvi). This description
tiques, yet inhabits intimately” (Spivak, 1990, p. 172). In seemed even more radical: the subject we believe we are is
other words, the structure undoes itself in its own time. only an interpretation, a linguistic fiction! With Rajchman
Deconstruction happens when “something in the world (2001), it seemed to me that “the real question [about the
forces us to think” (Deleuze, 1968/1994, p. 139); when “the subject, the ‘I’] is . . . how our lives ever acquire the consis-
world kicks back” (Barard, 1999, p. 2); when the given, the tency of an enduring self, given that it is born in ‘delirium,
dogmatic image of thought, no longer suffices. chance, and indifference’” (p. 13) as Nietzsche and post-
Deconstruction happens, shattering “all the familiar land- structural scholars suggest. Butler’s, Spivak’s, Nietzsche’s,
marks of . . . our thought . . . breaking up all the ordered Foucault’s, and others’ critiques had convinced me that “I”
surfaces and all the planes with which we are accustomed to was only one description or interpretation of human being—
tame the wild profusion of existing things” (Foucault, though a powerful one fashioned at a crucial moment in
1966/1970, p. xvi). And deconstruction can annihilate an Western history—and that if it could be thought and lived, so
image of thought such that it can never be thought again. could others. This was freedom indeed.
As I’ve explained, I found Deleuze’s and Deleuze and
“I” and Haecceity Guattari’s work together after I’d read other poststructural
scholars; in fact, quite a few of Deleuze’s (1991/1994) texts
What was it about haecceity that was so radical for me then? had not yet been translated into English in 1994 when I
I had studied poststructural theories of subjectivity and their began writing my dissertation. Their book, What is
critique of the Enlightenment’s description of man, Philosophy?, in which they noted the persistence of “I” in
Descartes’ cogito, the knowing, epistemological subject; a the face of centuries of critique, had just been translated. In
unique, unified, agentive, coherent, self-contained individ- it they wrote, “we are all contemplation, and therefore hab-
ual/person/self uncontaminated throughout his life by cul- its. I is a habit” (p. 105). They also wrote the quotation that
ture, by history, by living (see St. Pierre, 2000, 2011b); the begins this essay, suggesting that our goal might be “to
Self set against all the Others; the empirical Investigator; reach not the point where one no longer says I, but the point
the master of the universe. This subject is so normalized where it is no longer of any importance whether one says
he’s imperceptible. But poststructural feminism’s refusal of ‘I’” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980/1987, p. 3). They caution
that individual had given me hope, especially Butler’s cri- that
tique of the “I” along with other foundational concepts we
take for granted. Butler (1992) qualified her use of “I” in it is relatively easy to stop saying “I,” but that does not mean
this way: “My position is mine to the extent that ‘I’—and I you have gotten away from the regime of subjectification;
do not shirk from the pronoun—replay and resignify the conversely, you can keep on saying “I,” just for kicks, and
theoretical positions that have constituted me” (p. 9). For already be in another regime in which personal pronouns
Butler, agency is not innate but always possible because the function only as fictions. (p. 138)
688 Qualitative Inquiry 23(9)

Personal pronouns here refer to Nietzsche’s fictional English language, our grammar, requires (remember
subject that precedes the verb, that “I,” that “linguistic Nietzsche). The image was dog-run-road or road-dog-run,
index” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1991/1994, p. 18), that gram- and so on, all together, a simultaneity, one individuation—
matical subject of the verb we learn in English classes—an haecceity. Entanglement and assemblage, now popular
active, intentional, agential “I”—who initiates and autho- concepts, are also helpful in refusing common individua-
rizes the sentences upon which social science research is tions, but it was haecceity that intrigued me then, perhaps
based: “I investigate,” “I collect data,” “I analyze data,” “I because it was unintelligible and perhaps because I simply
find,” “ I know.” liked the sound of it.
Smith (2012), following Deleuze, helps us think about Deleuze (1990/1995) explained that
this contingent subject, this habit, this “I” we begin with as
researchers: there are many types of individuation. There are subject-type
individuations (“that’s you . . .,” “that’s me . . . ”), but there are
Like each of us, the philosopher—or the artist or the also event-type individuations where there’s no subject: a
mathematician—begins with the multiplicities that have wind, an atmosphere, a time of day, a battle. (p. 115)
invented him or her as a formed subject, living in an actualized
world, with an organic body, in a given political order, having A haecceity could be an event like five o’clock in the after-
learnt a certain language. But at its highest point, both writing noon; or a river on a bright, still afternoon; or Virginia
and thinking, as activities, consist in following the abstract Woolf’s heroine’s stroll; or “a strange moment during a
movement of what Deleuze calls a “line of flight” that extracts concert” (Rajchman, 2001, p. 85); or any intensity with
variable singularities from these multiplicities of lived “perfect individuality which should not be confused with
experience—because they are already there, even if they have
that of a thing or a formed subject” (Deleuze & Parnet,
been rendered ordinary [emphasis added]—and then makes
them function as variables in order to make them function
1977/2007, p. 92). Haecceity describes a nonpersonal mode
together in a singular and non-homogeneous whole, and thus of individuation that is not an individualization but which
participate in the construction of “new possibilities of life”— consists of “impersonal individuations, or even pre-individ-
for instance, the invention of new compositions in language . . . ual singularities” (Deleuze, 2002/2004, p. 137). Haecceities
and at the limit, the creation of a new world (through are “dynamic individuations without subjects” (Deleuze &
singularities and events). (p. 185) Parnet, 1997/2007, p. 93) or objects. A haecceity is not one
of a kind, but the “individuation of something that belongs
To me, believing we can create a new world is the epitome to no kind, but which, though perfectly individuated, yet
of freedom. retains an indefiniteness, as though pointing to something
Perhaps it’s just luck that we encounter what we need to ‘ineffable.’” (Rajchman, 2001, p. 85). A haecceity is a
think differently. A word, a sentence, can surely change singularity.
everything. Stalled in writing/thinking after fieldwork, I Deleuze and Guattari (1980/1987) cautioned that a haec-
devoured Deleuze and Guattari’s (1980/1987) book, A ceity does not consist “simply of a décor or backdrop that
Thousand Plateaus, where I found haecceity (thisness), a situates subjects, or of appendages that hold things and
concept credited to the 13th century scholastic philosopher, people to the ground. It is the entire assemblage in its indi-
Duns Scotus, who argued that formless matter exists (much vidual aggregate that is a haecceity” (p. 262). In this way,
like Deleuze and Guattari’s plane of immanence) and who “the street enters into composition with the horse” (p. 262),
described haecceity as an individuation not based on just as Woolf’s running dog enters into composition with
humans and objects. Sauvagnargues (2013) explained that the road. The dog and the horse “cease to be subjects to
Deleuze and Guattari warned “against the insidious habit become events, in assemblages that are inseparable from
of spatializing and positing an ‘I’ everywhere. The haec- the hour, a season, an atmosphere, an air, a life” (p. 263).
ceity never refers to an individual subject, it does not cut Haecceity is a singularity that has “neither a beginning nor
out a class of beings, but captures becomings in action” (p. an end, origin, nor destination; it is always in the middle. It
43). In their book, Deleuze and Guattari illustrated haec- is not made of points, only of lines. It is a rhizome” (p. 263).
ceity using a sentence written by Virginia Woolf, “The thin Given that haecceity seems such a grand concept, I espe-
dog is running in the road, this dog is the road” (p. 263). cially appreciated Deleuze and Guattari’s comment that
These words, this image, that concept seemed to be “a “haecceities can be modest and microscopic” (p. 141).
response to real problems” (Bogue, 1996, p. 263). I had Two characteristics of haecceity were particularly help-
encountered in fieldwork when taken-for-granted ontologi- ful in my study. First, a haecceity is not defined by linear,
cal distinctions collapsed—I will discuss those encounters chronological time but by “floating times” (Deleuze &
in the next section of this article. After haecceity, I could no Parnet, 1997/2007, p. 92). It “can last as long as, and even
longer separate or individuate the dog, the running, and the longer than, the time required for the development of a form
road and think one ahead of the other as the structure of the and the evolution of a subject” (p. 92). Second, haecceities
St. Pierre 689

are events, singularities always becoming in relations of is based on the Same/Other binary: the field is a place of
speed and slowness, so they have no essence that forms and cultural difference the researcher travels to, an inside (the
stabilizes them into a substance that can be subsumed under Same) against the outside that’s different from it (the Other).
another concept or category. They “are bits of experience For my dissertation research, I traveled from Ohio, where
that can’t be fit into a nice narrative unity” (Rajchman, I’d lived for almost 20 years, to my hometown, Milton (a
2001, p. 85) that begins with “I.” Haeceities cannot be cap- pseudonym), a small tobacco town in the Piedmont of the
tured by conventional humanist qualitative methodology’s Carolinas. I came to Milton as a five-year-old Yankee and
simple empiricism based on the idea that all knowledge lived and taught school there until I finally left for Ohio.
derives from the individual’s sensations of lived experi- But I’d returned home many times over the years to care for
ence. “I” does not exist ahead of experience. “I” does not my widowed mother, to visit my family, my friends and her
have an experience. There is no such “I.” friends, to just be there, be home.
In the next section, I provide examples from fieldwork As I grew older, I became increasingly interested in the
during my dissertation research when the world kicked category older woman—a category I would surely occupy
back. Interestingly, as Smith noted in the long quotation if I lived long enough. The older women I knew best were
above, it was in the thinking that writing produces—in those like my mother in Milton, women who had been my
thinking and writing with haecceity after fieldwork—that school teachers and Sunday school teachers, the mothers of
the field of conventional ethnography deconstructed itself my best friends who had taught me how to be a woman.
(St. Pierre, 1997b). What I learned in writing was that the Feminist and poststructural theories of the subject aside, I
epistemic field of my study which was already determined, suspected I would be much like them, and I wanted to know
and overdetermined, by conventional humanist qualitative what I was getting myself into. What does old woman look
methodology could not accommodate those startling like? “How does it get produced and regulated? . . . How
encounters with the real, a real that was certainly “no longer does it exist?” (Bové, 1990, p. 54). How can it be refused?
what it used to be” (Baudrillard, 1981/1988, p. 171). As With a research proposal approved by both my disserta-
Manning (2016) wrote, method, “an apparatus of capture,” tion committee and Ohio State University’s Institutional
works “as a safeguard against the ineffable: if something Review Board in hand, I went home in the summer and fall
cannot be categorized, it cannot be made to account for of 1993 for fieldwork. I describe that research project—
itself and is cast aside as irrelevant” (p. 32). There was no which was designed as what I now call conventional human-
room in conventional qualitative methodology for the inef- ist qualitative research—as a combination of an interview
fable that ripped through my well-composed study. study with 36 older White southern women who lived in my
The tales of the field (Van Maanen, 1988) that follow hometown and a long-term prior ethnography of that small
rely on the “I” of conventional humanist qualitative meth- rural community. I used Foucault’s ethical analysis, care of
odology’s ethnography and autoethnography, on the empiri- the self, to investigate the arts of existence the women used
cal Investigator awash in the sensory overload, the mad during their long lives in the construction of their subjectiv-
rush, of fieldwork. I did not have Deleuze’s concepts to ity (St. Pierre, 1995).
think with when I was doing official fieldwork. I did have The key in that problem statement, and what I suspect is
some feminist and poststructural critiques of the humanist the condition that produced the study’s ontological disso-
subject that I described earlier which induced their own nance and enabled my career-long deconstruction of nor-
strangeness and a question for another paper: what do we malized qualitative methodology, is the phrase long-term
make of using one theory of the subject to interpret the lives prior ethnography. The study began unofficially (when I
of people who know nothing of it and live in another? It was five) much sooner than it began officially (when I was
seems we’re caught between letting the theories we’ve middle-aged). It began before it began, and I had always
studied overdetermine our studies from the beginning or been in the middle of it. I had been interviewing and observ-
trying to paste them on at the end. More likely, we’re doing ing in Milton—collecting and interpreting data—for
both and more because we can never be neutral or objec- decades before I returned to study it for my dissertation
tive—we’re never theory-free. More to the point, we’re research. That condition disrupted the study, to say the least.
never free of some theory of ontology. If I had designed a different study with people I didn’t know
in a place I didn’t know, the same ontological problem
A Tale of the Field: Conditions of might not have overtaken the study. But the time-space of
the study called into question normalized categories of con-
Inquiry, Encounters With the Real, and
ventional humanist qualitative methodology, especially the
Ontological Dissonance field (St. Pierre, 1997b), interviews and observations (St.
Conventional humanist qualitative methodology uses eth- Pierre, 1995), data and data analysis (St. Pierre, 1997a,
nographic methods of data collection like interviewing and 2013b; St. Pierre & Jackson, 2014), and, of course, all the
observation to collect data in the field. The idea of the field “I’s” of the study.
690 Qualitative Inquiry 23(9)

Ontological dissonance first became apparent during we were supposed to. But when they fail, what was given is
interviews. I had talked with many of those Milton women in play again, and anything is possible. For example, if the
for years, and during official interviews with a tape recorder field is unstable, so is everything we “do” in it, like collect-
running, it was sometimes difficult to determine which/ ing data. What/when was data in my study? I collected offi-
when woman I interviewed. Was she the fragile, old, dying cial data in the field, recording face-to-face interviews and
woman I interviewed in her bedroom or the young, elegant, writing detailed fieldnotes from face-to-face observations.
vibrant Latin teacher I so admired as a teenager? Likewise, But, later, when I returned to Ohio to write up my study, data
who/when was I—her devoted young student sitting rapt in came from everywhere as I wrote—from a past long before
the front row of her classroom or her final devoted scribe, my study began, from a future I had not yet lived, from
bent over her bed, straightening her pillows while we talked. dreams—and an audit trail from data in official interview
Time was not linear; “we” were unstable. transcripts and fieldnotes to the sentences I wrote was
Strange things happened not only in interviews but also impossible. As I’ve written (Richardson & St. Pierre, 2005),
in observations. Which/when Milton was I studying—the I “collected” data as I wrote.
Milton a five-year-old Yankee outsider had had to interpret The radical empiricism of the study I lived, which
or the Milton a middle-aged researcher had permission to opened to conditions of possible experience, was not the
investigate? The study’s empirical density multiplied and simple empiricism of the phenomenology of conventional
exploded out of its methodological container when observa- humanist qualitative methodology that digs deep into the
tions during fieldwork were no longer linked to a linear per- given, into experience that has been closed off and normal-
spective. Time was unhinged, and there was no present with ized (see, e.g., St. Pierre, 2016b). But I knew little about
its past to secure the study. Because I had walked the streets empiricism then. Even in a fairly undisciplined discipline
of Milton my whole life, the new gym on Main St. easily like education, which may or may not be a social science, I
became the women’s clothing store in the same location studied more empirical social science methodology as a
where we shopped when I was a girl. When I went to our doctoral student than the onto-epistemological arrange-
church with my mother, the widows scattered in the pews ments in which various empiricisms and their methodolo-
were magically joined by their strong young husbands, long gies—or no methodology at all—can be thought.
dead, whom I saw, plain as day, sitting beside them as they The focus of my doctoral program was always on the end
always had, heads bowed in prayer. game, on fieldwork, on practice, on procedural methodol-
There was no present with its future either. As I walked ogy, on application, at the expense of the images of thought
down College Street past the elementary school four gen- that enabled them. I studied enough poststructuralism to
erations of women in my family had attended, I saw myself understand Rorty’s (1986) comment that “we only know the
sitting on the front porch of the big old house I’ve always world and ourselves under a description” (p. 48), but, to me,
wanted to live in, my house in a future, the home of an old, then, he referred to epistemological diversity, which I had
old woman come home to Milton to die. When I drove studied—feminist epistemologies, queer epistemologies,
down a country road to find the pre-Civil War home of a race epistemologies, and so on—but not to ontological or
participant, a cousin I’d visited for decades, my body, one empirical diversity. Thus, I mostly ignored the strangeness
with the car and the road, anticipated every curve, every of fieldwork in the spectacular rush of doing it. It all seemed
tobacco field coming up, the moment when I should lower a blur, an intensity I lived but could not think or fit into
the visor to block the sun. Even though my cousin was now existing research categories. It was when writing, too,
a shut-in confined to a wheel chair, I could see her sitting on became the field; when writing insisted I attend to the
the porch railing, waiting for me, knowing I’d be right on strange and singular encounters with the real in Milton that
time. The objective reality humanist methodology assumes the slow deconstruction of conventional humanist qualita-
fell apart in fieldwork as linear time collapsed in a different tive methodology began. As Derrida (2007) explained,
temporal and ontological arrangement, in a fold of time, deconstruction “does not settle for methodological proce-
perhaps the “floating” (Deleuze & Parnet, 1977/2007, p. dures, it opens up a passageway, it marches ahead and
92) time of haecceity. I never knew quite where/when/what marks a trail” (p. 42).
“I” was because “ontological units” (May, 2005, p. 121) The text writes itself, and the first chapter of my disserta-
other than individual human beings were in play. Sometimes tion begins with a dream and a sentence that became a
I thought I had dissolved into all the times of Milton, into all refrain repeated throughout the dissertation: “This story
the old women, that “I” had once again become formless, never begins but has always been, and I slip into it over and
imperceptible, awaiting a different individuation. over again in different places, and it is as if I too have
Categories like “I,” time, and the field that condition always been there” (St. Pierre, 1995, p. 5). This refrain was
fieldwork in conventional humanist qualitative methodol- “a prism, a crystal of space-time” (Deleuze & Guattari,
ogy from the beginning immobilize us, require that we return 1980/1987, p. 348) that staked out the strange ontological
to them at the end and acknowledge that we recognized what difference I had lived in fieldwork but could barely think
St. Pierre 691

and write then. Repeating the refrain as I wrote comforted and treats it every time as something that has not always
me, assured me that I was on to something, it reoriented me; existed, but begins, forced and under constraint” (Deleuze,
it slowed me down before I speeded up again. 1968/1994, p. 136). Thus, recognition and intelligibility are
So that is how it worked. Encounters with ontological deprived of their necessity and “we can be thrown into a
difference during fieldwork in Milton, in reading, in writ- becoming by anything at all, by the most unexpected, most
ing, and in thinking were truly shocks to thought. “No insignificant of things” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980/1987, p.
method can determine in advance what compels us to 292). But, as Derrida understood, we researchers do not ini-
think,” only the “imperative imposed by the problem” tiate this—it happens. Bryant’s (2008) caution is important
(Smith, 2012, p. 181). The problem that pressed on me dur- here:
ing fieldwork and in writing was that conventional human-
ist qualitative methodology was “predicated on the we must be skeptical and conservative concerning our own
assumption that the scientific community knows what the powers of invention. Just as Nietzsche claimed that thoughts
world is like” (Kuhn, 1970, p. 5), and more specifically, that come to us, we don’t originate thoughts, so too must we
it is based on recognizable, accepted ontologies and their understand that we are not the creators but are the result of
these invented intuitions. The will to create will most likely end
corresponding empiricisms. That methodology, based on
up in trite imitations of what already belongs to the field of the
the incrementalism of positivist social science (even as it recognized. We do not set the problems to be solved, but
professes to be phenomenological), almost guaranteed I instead find ourselves in the midst of problems which function
would simply repeat existing knowledge—perhaps add like imperatives to which we must respond. (pp. 9-10)
another small brick that hardly mattered to fill a gap in a
structure of knowledge. In that methodology, the idea that Given that social science is based on the “I,” the empirical
existing relations might become variable was not possible. Investigator, my question has become whether we can think
The concept haecceity and words from Virginia Woolf I together social science research and philosophical concepts
found after fieldwork and before writing did not signal rec- like haecceity. Of course, Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts
ognition (and then representation) of either the everyday are already being used in social science research.
lived experience of participants in the study or mine as a Nonetheless, I worry about a too-casual application of con-
researcher. In other words, I did not identify those moments
cepts, especially for new researchers who, for example, use
of ontological dissonance I described above as haecceities
the philosophical concept rhizome, which is both anti-
and then organize my “findings” by describing, say, four
method and anti-”I” in an autoethnography, a humanist
haecceities I “found in my data”—remember that a haec-
methodological research design based on the “I.” I argue it’s
ceity is not a substance that can be recognized and repre-
imperative we social science researchers not skip that long
sented. “Recognizing is the opposite of the encounter”
preparation required to move into a different image of
(Deleuze & Parnet, 1977/2007, p. 8). What that means is
thought. I will return to this caution at the end of this essay.
that a philosophical concept like haecceity cannot be
“applied” to and so represent something in the empirical
world as social scientists are wont to do with concepts, for Philosophy’s Plane of Immanence and
example, “That vignette was an example of teenage cul-
Conceptual Personae
ture” or “I recognized racism in that school.” Instead, philo-
sophical concepts like haecceity act with force, with In their book, “What is Philosophy,” Deleuze and Guattari
violence, on “the flows of everyday thought” (Deleuze, (1991/1994) wrote that there are “three great forms of
1995, p. 32) that in its givenness seems necessary. And the thought” which are equally but differently creative: philos-
world acts with force too, when it refuses the conditioning ophy, science, and art. The conceptual personae of philoso-
we’ve used to tame it. phy create concepts on a plane of immanence, the partial
After haecceity, I was no longer sure “I” thought, deduc- observers of science create functives on a plane of refer-
tively or inductively, as researchers are instructed when ence, and the aesthetic figures of art create percepts and
they analyze data collected from the “flow of opinion, the affects on a plane of composition. Deleuze and Guattari dis-
doxa, the flow of convention, idle talk and idle chatter, the cussed each form of creative thought and their relation to
discourse of the “they” (what “they” say; Smith, 2012, p. each other in their book, but their chief task was to stake out
185). I came to understand that thought is not “the verb of a domain that is philosophy’s own.
an ‘I’” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1991/1994, p. 27) but is, In their introduction to the book, they were dismissive of
instead, “thought without image” that disrupts established, rival claims to concept-creation from, for example, the
normalized relations of identity (this is that) and puts the human sciences (especially sociology), epistemology, lin-
variables of relations into play again in “continuous varia- guistics, psychoanalysis, and logical analysis because these
tion or pure variability” (Smith, 2012, p. 180). A philosoph- disciplines use concepts to consolidate and then represent
ical concept like haecceity “strips thought of its ‘innateness,’ states of affairs in the world. In doing so, they condition
692 Qualitative Inquiry 23(9)

possible experience to make it fit into preexisting concepts decoded, absolutely deterritorialized matter” (Bogue, 1989,
to add to the already-known, the foundations of knowledge. p. 132)—pure difference, pure variation, limitless. It is a
Deleuze and Guattari (1991/1994) argued that such work flattened plane on which disparate things and signs move at
cannot be creative. They were especially disdainful of infinite virtual speeds and slowness: “a semiotic fragment
“shameful and inane rivals” (p. 11): the fields of computer rubs shoulders with a chemical interaction, an electron
science, marketing, design, advertising, the disciplines of crashed into a language, a crystallization produces a pas-
communication, as well as information services and engi- sion” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1980/1987, p 69). Philosophy is
neering, all of which “seized hold of the word concept” in both the creation of concepts and the laying out of a plane
their enterprises to market and sell, for example, “a packet of immanence which, then, is the “foundation on which it
of noodles” (p. 10). creates its concepts” (p. 41). But concepts are not deduced
Deleuze and Guattari (1991/1994) made it clear that phi- from the plane; rather, they “pave, occupy, or populate the
losophy is not, as is generally thought, “contemplation, plane bit by bit, whereas the plane itself is the indivisible
reflection, or communication,” which they argued are milieu in which concepts are distributed without breaking
“machines for constituting Universals” (p. 6) that confine up its continuity or integrity” (p. 36). The plane is an image
thought to what has already been thought. Lawlor (2003) of thought that is constantly self-differentiating, being
wrote that Platonic thought, for example, became immobile, made, being laid out at different speeds, but not in a system-
“returning at the end to an idea that had already been present atic way. Deleuze and Guattari (1991/1994) described this
at the origin, leaving thought caught between a beginning work as a “groping experimentation” that is not “very
and an end” (p. 123). For Plato, instances of “justice” in the respectable, rational, or reasonable” (p. 41).
affairs of men, in lived experience, were always conditioned According to Deleuze and Guattari (1991/1994), over
by the preexisting transcendental Platonic Form of Justice. centuries of thought, the three great forms of creativity—
The problem that results is that justice can never be thought philosophy, science, and art—have laid out many planes as
differently, it cannot become; it is always and only deter- they have confronted and tried to capture chaos, which they
mined by the universal concept Justice. To say it a bit differ- wrote is “characterized less by the absence of determina-
ently, the danger of using a universal concept at the beginning tions than by the infinite speed with which they take shape
is that one is likely to recognize in the world, in states of and vanish” (p. 42). But “the base of all planes is the plane
affairs, only representations which the concept conditions. of immanence . . . that which must be thought and that
Unlike universal concepts, philosophical concepts like haec- which cannot be thought. It is the nonthought within
ceity are singularities, preindividual and prepersonal indi- thought” (p. 59), the “unthought in every plane” (p. 60).
viduations that are not preconditioned by universals. In fact, Deleuze and Guattari used the Cartesian plane of thought as
they do not exist but are always becoming and mutating as an example of a philosophical plane and noted that it is
they respond to a problem imposed on thought. More impor- based on an image of thought whose commonsense assump-
tantly, the actual in states of affairs does not and cannot tion is that “everyone knows what thinking, being, and I
resemble the virtual, the singularity, that produced it—it is a mean” (p. 26). Concepts have components, and Deleuze
genuine creation, the “new.” and Guattari explained that doubting, thinking, and being—
Philosophy’s task, then, is not passive but active; its goal categories Descartes (1637/1993) used to order human
is to create, to make something new. In this regard, Deleuze activity—are the components of his concept, the cogito.
and Guattari (1991/1994) wrote that “philosophy is the art of These components exist in zones of neighborhood that con-
forming, inventing, and fabricating concepts” (p. 2); that nect them, and the concept cogito forms itself, “condenses”
“philosophy is the discipline that involves creating con- (p. 25) or intensifies, when “I” passes through all the neigh-
cepts” (p. 5); that “the object of philosophy is to create con- borhoods. The first concept on Descartes’ plane, then, was
cepts that are always new” (p. 5) (always new because the cogito, who doubts, thinks, and is. The concept and the
philosophical concepts are not universal but always becom- plane are thus posited together in thinking, and once this
ing); and, further, that philosophy is the “creation of con- new “I” is posited on the plane, other concepts can be pos-
cepts and the laying out of a plane” (p. 36). I will return to a ited as well, and the plane can be laid out.
discussion of philosophical concepts and their possible use Planes have strata, or thickenings—“accumulations,
in the social sciences after explaining philosophy’s plane. coagulations, sedimentations, foldings” (Deleuze &
Philosophy’s plane is called, variously, the plane of Guattari, 1980/1987, p. 502), “layers, belts” (p. 40)—espe-
immanence, the plane of consistency, the body without cially planes as old as Descartes’. Strata are mobile, connect
organs, and the abstract machine. Using different names with other strata, are buried as substratum, then surface
for the plane of immanence is an example of how philoso- again. Strata capture and territorialize the formless matter
phers recast and renew their concepts over time and how a of the plane of immanence and can produce highly stratified
“concept sometimes needs a new word to express it” structures and hierarchies; they order the chaos of the world
(Deleuze, 1990/1995, p. 32). This plane is “destratified, differently again and again through “everyday practice,
St. Pierre 693

habit, stupidity, capital” (p. 159). Strata capture formless through an intentional, causal, or linear development—is
matter from the plane of immanence which is then propelled the becoming of philosophy.
from the plane like “a falling fruit” (Deleuze & Parnet, As noted at the beginning of this section, conceptual
1977/2007, p. 150). Deleuze and Guattari (1980/1987) personae are involved in the creation of concepts on the
named the three great strata “that most directly bind us: the plane of immanence. Deleuze and Guattari (1991/1994) did
organism, signifiance [sic], and subjectification” (p. 159). not explain exactly what they are except to emphasize that
But the formless matter of the plane of immanence is they are not philosophers, not human subjects or “psycho-
always there, “everywhere, always primary, always imma- social types” (p. 64) who are living, historical figures.
nent” (p. 70), deterritorializing strata as they crack and Conceptual personae are more like an event—even though
shift. That is why, as noted earlier, the plane of immanence they may sometimes have a proper name. For example,
contains diverse bits of deterritorialized strata from differ- Deleuze and Guattari suggested that Socrates was the con-
ent planes, for example, a fencepost, an interpretation, a ceptual personae of Platonism and Dionysus of Nietzsche.
memory, a love affair. The strata are “residue” from the Other conceptual personae have more general names: the
plane of immanence (p. 56). Madman, the Idiot, the Claimant, the Friend, and the empir-
In their book, A Thousand Plateaus, Deleuze and icists’ Investigator. They explained that conceptual personae
Guattari (1980/1987) posited a machinic assemblage are barely discernible, mysterious, hazy, moving, and
(which is different from an abstract machine) between the becoming with the creation of concepts and the laying out
plane of immanence and the strata. The machinic assem- of the plane of immanence. They proliferate on the same or
blage exists in two states of intensity, with one of its sides a different plane, and their purpose is solely to think and “to
facing the absolutely deterritorialized plane of immanence show thought’s territories, its absolute deterritorializations
and the other side facing the strata which try to signify, sub- and reterritorializations” (p. 89). Conceptual personae can
jectify, and organize the formless matter of the plane (the think in us and cause language to stammer, can cause
body without organs). As they work, machinic assemblages thought to stammer. In this way, the “philosopher is only the
“rotate in all directions, like beacons” (p. 73). Deleuze and envelope of his principal conceptual personae” (p. 64). It
Guattari’s question about this constant movement between should be clear by now that there is no methodical rational-
the plane and the strata, between deterritorialization and ter- ity in this thinking and becoming that guarantees a correct
ritorialization, is “not how something manages to leave the outcome. Rather, the conceptual personae
strata but how things get into them in the first place” (p. 56).
At any rate, the goal of philosophy is to experiment with the plunges into the chaos from which it extracts the determinations
flows of destratification on the strata and to tip the machinic with which it produces the diagrammatic features of a plane of
assemblage toward the plane of immanence, toward pure immanence: it is as if it seizes a handful of dice from chance-
difference and possibilities for the new. Clearly, the philos- chaos so as to throw them on the table. (p. 78)
ophy Deleuze and Guattari described is active, shot through
with movement and becoming, full of possibilities, experi- Can such an unpredictable, unscientific venture work? The
mental. There is nothing passive, stable, certain, universal, plane created with the conceptual personae may at first
or totalizing about this image of thought—philosophy is respond to the problem at hand, but it might also veer off
infinitely creative. and enable other problems to be thought that require other
It follows, then, that Deleuze and Guattari (1991/1994) concepts and planes. Thus, “philosophy lives in a perma-
argued that every great philosopher is creative and lays out nent crisis. The plane takes effect through shocks, concepts
a new plane of immanence, a new image of thought, based proceed in bursts, and personae by spasms. The relationship
on his problem (e.g., Plato’s transcendent doubling; among the three instances is problematic by nature” (p. 82).
Descartes’s fear of doubt, of error) that changes so com- Conventional standards of goodness, truth, adequacy, and
pletely the way we think that no two philosophers could be so on cannot be applied to this philosophy. “Rather, it is
on the same plane. Functionaries, on the other hand, use a categories like Interesting, Remarkable, or Important that
ready-made thought without being aware of the problem determine success or failure” (p. 82). In any case, ordinary,
that produced the thought to begin with. My earlier example habitual, stratified thought must be violated and shocked
of a qualitative researcher using the philosophical concept out of its necessity to enable the unthought within thought.
rhizome in an autoethnography is an example of a function-
ary not understanding the ontological problem to which rhi-
zome responds. But different philosophers can use another
The Concept of Concept
philosopher’s image of thought and create new concepts on According to Deleuze and Guattari (1991/1994), the third
the same plane for a long time until the plane begins to be a element of philosophy, in addition to the plane of imma-
different plane. This coexistence of planes always diverg- nence and conceptual personae, is the philosophical con-
ing, joining, being laid out here and there by chance—not cept. I discuss it last because the other two elements are
694 Qualitative Inquiry 23(9)

strange, created in an unfamiliar image of thought, and so multiplicity because the components remain separate and
must be understood to some extent to understand the do not dissolve into a whole. The concept is the “point of
third element, Deleuze and Guattari’s “concept of con- coincidence, condensation, or accumulation of its own
cept” (p. 19), which is different from the concepts of phi- components” (p. 20). If a component is removed from or
losophy’s rivals like the human sciences—for example, added to a concept, it is no longer the same concept.
culture from anthropology, role from sociology, cognitive As mentioned earlier, concepts link to other concepts in
from psychology—and concepts from other rivals like their zones of neighborhood on the plane by constructing a
direct marketing from advertising and message from bridge to another concept, thus paving or populating the
communication theory, all of which Deleuze and Guattari plane bit by bit and laying it out (exoconsistency). The
disdained and dismissed. Unlike those concepts, a philo- specificity of the concept depends not only on its endocon-
sophical concept does not correspond to and represent a sistency but also on its exoconsistency because “a concept
state of affairs in the world. For example, as I wrote earlier, vanishes when it is thrust into a new milieu” (Deleuze &
haecceity cannot be attached to qualitative data—lived Guattari, 1991/1994, p. 28) on a different plane that has
experience—so that a researcher could write in her find- been laid out in a different image of thought. As concepts
ings, “I found four haeccities about that culture’s music in connect, the plane may curve, enabling new problems, new
my qualitative study.” Unlike other concepts, a philosophi- concepts in response to those problems, and new solutions.
cal concept cannot be used to classify and organize empiri- At some point, the plane may become a new plane.
cal materials into a system, perhaps an encyclopedia, or Deleuze and Guattari (1991/1994) clarified the relation
into a discursive system of knowledge, nor can it serve between concepts and the plane as follows: “concepts are
capital’s commercial ventures as a product to be traded, concrete assemblages, like the configurations of a machine,
“Here’s a concept you can use to sell your product.” but the plane is the abstract machine of which these assem-
Philosophical concepts have “the more modest task of a blages are the working parts” (p. 36). Even though concepts
pedagogy of the concept” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1991/1994, “are dated, signed, and baptized” (p. 8) by their conceptual
p. 12) in that they are “experimental tools that are born out personae, they may mutate, be renewed, and be replaced as
of the tensions between the empirical world” and “philo- in the earlier example of Deleuze and Guattari’s ongoing
sophical thought” (Gane, 2009, p. 87), and they teach us renewal and renaming of the concept body without organs
something, as did haecceity in my dissertation study. I (plane of immanence, plane of consistency, abstract
learned that the empirical world associated with haecceity machine). A concept is a particular kind of open-ended mul-
does not begin with “I” but is a nonsubjective, impersonal, tiplicity always becoming, first, as its components become
preindividual empirical world—a simple “there is.” Again, in “continuous variation” (Smith, 2010a, p. 57) and, second,
haecceity is a response to an ontological problem that is not as it becomes in infinite variation (through mobile bridges)
thinkable in the empiricism of conventional humanist quali- with other concepts on the same plane and other planes.
tative methodology. Deleuze and Guattari’s questions about the creation of con-
Deleuze and Guattari (1991/1994) did not define a philo- cepts were: “‘What to put in a concept?’ and ‘What to put it
sophical concept, tell us what it means. In fact, they wrote with?’” (p. 90).
that concepts are “fuzzy and vague” (p. 143), so here I pile Concepts don’t come from just anywhere, and Smith
up snippets of their and others’ words that might be helpful. (2010b) argued that concepts are “never created willy-nilly,
They explained that concepts like haecceity are neither but always as a function of a problem” (p. 136) thinkable
ideas nor objects nor functions (like the functives of sci- only in a particular image of thought. They are singularities
ence). They are creative forces, “learning devices” (Gane, (without an identity) linked to problems “without which
2009, p. 91), “singularities, rather, acting on flows of every- they would have no meaning and which can themselves
day thought” (Deleuze, 1990/1995, p. 32). They are “pre- only be isolated or understood as their solution emerges”
carious and unstable bridges between the empirical world (Deleuze & Guattari, 1991/1994, p. 16). The concept is a
and its presentation in thought” (Deleuze & Guattari, possibility in a particular milieu. It is an intensity, a “center
1990/1994, p. 85). The concept, then, is “an act of thought, of vibration” (p. 23) with the “contour, the configuration,
it is thought operating at infinite . . . speed” (p. 21). Because the constellation of an event to come” (p. 33)—the not-yet
they create the unthought within thought, concepts are “full that might be thought and lived. In fact, the concept helps
of a critical, political force of freedom” (Deleuze, form that event. “The greatness of a philosophy is measured
1990/1995, p. 32) and possible worlds. by the nature of the events to which its concepts summon us
Deleuze and Guattari (1991/1994) did explain that a con- or that it enables us to release in concepts” (p. 34), perhaps
cept is composed of distinct but inseparable components. in a “blast of original concepts” (p. 32). Deleuze and
For example, thinking, doubting, and being are the compo- Guattari, always staking out philosophy’s domain, wrote,
nents of Descartes’ cogito that give it its specificity, its con- “The concept belongs to philosophy and only to philoso-
sistency, which is not a unity (endoconsistency) but a phy” (p. 34).
St. Pierre 695

Can We Take Deleuze Into the Field? the milieu of Deleuze and Guattari’s transcendental empiri-
cism and plopped down in the milieu of a qualitative inter-
If philosophical concepts, as described by Deleuze and view study. As explained earlier, there is a specificity to a
Guattari, exist in a specific philosophical relation with con- philosophical concept that is different from concepts in the
ceptual personae and a plane of immanence—if the con- human sciences, the social sciences, and education that do
cepts are philosophical, if they have a “precise philosophical “travel” (e.g., Bal, 2002; Culler, 2000). Sixth, if social sci-
value” (Brown, 2010, p. 107)—can the empirical entists do create philosophical concepts, one might argue
Investigator of philosophy’s rivals—for example, the they are doing philosophy instead of social science.
human or social sciences—take them into the empirical Bonta (2009) asked whether we social scientists can take
“field” of those disciplines (Bonta, 2009) and use them with Deleuze to the field, whether we can do that work well, and
social objects that exist in a different ontological arrange- whether we can “get it right” (p. 137). Bonta and Protevi
ment? This is a very serious question. Remember that the (2004), Brown (2010), DeLanda (2006), and Fuglsang and
social sciences did not rise to the level of a positivity for Sørensen (2006), among others, have thoughtfully explored
Deleuze and Guattari as did philosophy, science, and art. these possibilities. I agree with Gane’s (2009) statement
For that reason, they did not lay out a plane for the social that “Deleuze’s empiricism offers a way out of hackneyed
sciences but, in fact, treated them as second-rate. Here are and time-worn sociological debates about the connection
some points to consider as we think about this question. between theoretical and empirical research, and the tech-
First, of course, is the condition just mentioned, that niques or ‘methods’ needed for the study of so-called ‘real-
Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophical concepts exist only in ity.’” (p. 83). But are we doing this work well or are we just
relation with philosophical conceptual personae on philoso- ill-prepared functionaries? I fear the rush to application that
phy’s plane of immanence, not with, say, Clifford Geertz (a structures the empirical social sciences maintains the the-
person, a proper name) in a discursive system of knowledge ory/practice divide. Deleuze (1985/1989), however, argued
like cultural anthropology (a human science). against that binary as follows:
Second, Deleuze and Guattari’s transcendental empiri-
cism is incompatible with the empiricisms of phenomenol- However, philosophical theory is itself a practice, just as much
ogy and logical empiricism which pervade the human as its object. It is no more abstract than its object. It is a practice
sciences in general and conventional humanist qualitative of concepts, and it must be judged in the light of the other
inquiry in particular. Transcendental empiricism does not practices with which it interferes. (p. 280).
begin with the implicit presupposition of the subject of
action—the “I” of lived experience that initiates the human Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophical concepts have
sciences. Instead, it conceives a prepersonal “field without been popping up everywhere recently, removed from their
subjects” (Deleuze & Guattari, 1991/1994, p. 48) populated milieu, from the image of thought in which they were cre-
by “impersonal individuations” and “pre-individual singu- ated and the problems to which they respond. Granted, con-
larities” (Deleuze, 2002/2004, p. 137)—the plane of imma- cepts like assemblage and rhizome are immediately “useful”
nence described earlier in this article. For that reason, but not for hasty application in a conventional humanist
Deleuze and Guattari (1991/1994) asked, “Is it necessary qualitative study where they vanish. In similar fashion,
‘to begin,’ and, if so, is it necessary to start from the point of Marcus and Saka (2006) wrote that “it has been the power
view of a subjective certainty” (p. 27)? In the fluid ontology and often beguiling attraction of Deleuze and Guattari’s
of transcendental empiricism that informs, for example, language that has encouraged the piecemeal appropriation
post qualitative inquiry, the answer is “no.” In this empiri- of certain concepts [they focus on assemblage] for the re-
cism, “‘I’ loses all meaning, the beginning loses all neces- making of middle-range theorizing that informs contempo-
sity” (p. 27), and “ontological units” (May, 2005, p. 121) rary research projects” (p. 103). Massumi (2002a) warned
other than individual human beings are possible. However, that we should not apply concepts because application is
“I” does begin the empiricisms of phenomenology and logi- about “mastery and control” (p. 17). And Deu (2007)
cal empiricism. explained that “Deleuze’s philosophy is neither so abstract
Third, Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts are responses to as to be divorced from practical relevance nor is it in any
particular philosophical problems that are unlikely to be the way directly ‘applicable’ to experience, in the manner, say,
same in anthropology or cognitive psychology or literacy of a scientific theory” (pp. 4-5). How, then, are philosophi-
education. Fourth, if the components of a philosophical cal concepts useful for social scientists? I believe they are
concept change, it is no longer the same concept. It is useful not in “application” but in reorienting thought and in
unlikely that the components of the concept rhizome would inspiring and sustaining the long preparation of reading and
be the same if it is “applied,” for example, in autoethnogra- studying the history and politics of ontology and empiri-
phy. Fifth, a concept vanishes if thrust into a new milieu. I cism and philosophy that can denaturalize the dogmatic
believe the concept rhizome disappears if it is taken from image of thought that traps us.
696 Qualitative Inquiry 23(9)

Deleuze and Guattari’s blast of philosophical concepts the principle strata of conventional humanist qualitative
responds to problems the world asks us, but surely there are methodology: the organism, signifiance [sic], and subjectifi-
other problems we have not yet thought that become thinkable cation. They help loosen matter captured on the strata and
in images of thought neither Cartesian nor Deleuzian. If one or return it to chaos, to the formless matter of the plane of imma-
two images of thought can be thought, so can others. According nence and infinite possibility.
to Deleuze and Guattari, the condition of possibility for pure And so the forces of the world change the problems
difference, for a “new” image of thought, is that we be avail- we’ve asked of it and then change the concepts with which
able to the world, that we trust it, that we trust that a “funda- we’ve responded. The world kicks back and demands a new
mental encounter” with the world that “can only be sensed” image of thought which can institute new concepts and a
(Deleuze, 1968/1994, p. 139) is possible. Nonconceptual new plane. “On the edge of the thing” (Derrida, 2006/2008,
forces of the world “not already contained in our projects and p. 9) where anything can happen, we must deconstruct the
the ways of thinking that accompany them” (Rajchman, 2001, traditions we inherit and do it well. What new concepts can
p. 7) can teach us that a different world is already there, waiting we think? What components will we put into those con-
to be thought and lived. cepts? What concepts will link via mobile bridges to other
Old concepts not renewed and new “flimsy concepts” concepts on that plane and other planes? What planes will
(Deleuze & Guattari, 1991/1994, p. 83) weigh us down, but be laid out and with what others will they intersect? What,
a new concept that responds to a problem might just shift the then, can be thought? It might be too much to wish for, but
curve of a plane so a new plane is formed. How do we create perhaps Deleuze’s image of thought or another we must
new concepts? Massumi (2002a) warned that “the first rule think could someday become as imperceptible as Descartes’.
of thumb if you want to invent or reinvent concepts is sim-
ply: don’t apply them” (p. 17). Again, a concept is not a Declaration of Conflicting Interests
functive of science but an “act of thought” extracted from a The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect
“thought flow” (Smith, 2010b, p. 144), not from a person, an to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
individual, a human being who willy-nilly creates concepts.
For me, this creativity resonates with Derrida’s deconstruc-
Funding
tion in that it happens without intention or deliberation and
certainly not at the will of a human being. Something in the The author received no financial support for the research, author-
ship, and/or publication of this article.
world forces us to think, and a concept appears.
I expect few researchers in the human sciences, the
social sciences, and education create philosophical con- References
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Author Biography
London, England: Bloomsbury. Elizabeth Adams St.Pierre is professor of critical studies in the
Smith, D. W. (2010a). Deleuze: Concepts as continuous variation educational theory and practice department and affiliated profes-
(J. S. Litaker, Interviewer). Journal of Philosophy: A Cross- sor of both the Interdisciplinary Qualitative Research Program
Disciplinary Inquiry, 5(11), 57-60. and the Institute of Women’s Studies at the University of Georgia.
Smith, D. W. (2010b). On the becoming of concepts. In D. Smith, Her work focuses on theories of language and the subject from
Essays on Deleuze (pp. 122-145). Edinburgh, Scotland: critical and poststructural theories in what she has called post
Edinburgh University Press. qualitative inquiry—what might come after conventional human-
Smith, D. W. (2012). Concepts and creation. In R. Braidotti & ist qualitative research methodology. She’s especially interested
P. Pisters (Eds.), Revising normativity with Deleuze (pp. 175- in the new empiricisms and new materialisms enabled by the
188). London, England: Bloomsbury. ontological turn.